Nisht kayn Desdemona, nisht kayn Dzulieta

Yiddish Adaptations of The Merchant of Venice and the Early Modern Father-Daughter Bond

Authors

  • Farrah Lehman University of Nebraska

Abstract

This essay examines three Yiddish "readings" of The Merchant of Venice — Joseph Bovshover's translation (1899), Avrom Morevski's critical essay (1937), and Maurice Schwartz's stage adaptation (1947) — that deal with Shylock's apparent betrayal by his daughter Jessica. Although these readings reflect sociocultural preoccupations with losing a daughter to intermarriage in a violently anti-Semitic environment, they also pick up on concerns present in the early modern English rendering of the father-daughter relationship and the sense of filial duty that informed it. Bovshover, Morevski, and Schwartz, I will argue, seem to have "read into" Shakespeare a correlation between the figure of the rebellious daughter and a wider preoccupation, shared in a sense by the early modern English and early twentieth-century Jews, with threats to national identity.

Author Biography

Farrah Lehman, University of Nebraska

Farrah Lehman is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln specializing in English Renaissance drama, with interests in performance and media theory. Her work on intersections between posthumanist new media theory and English Renaissance drama will appear in two forthcoming edited essay collections.

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Published

2009-05-01